Moving to the cloud can be a decision your organisation needs to make to transfer over your digital and IT resources to an improved service. You can reduce costs, improve efficiency and avoid outdated computing services by undertaking a migration, which can have long-term positive impacts on the business. However, this isn’t without a thorough strategy and research into the right solution for the organisation’s needs.
So, should you move to the Cloud? We explore what a cloud migration is, the benefits, challenges and the migration process.
What is a Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving the organisation’s IT resources and digital assets from an internal data centre or private server to a cloud computing platform. If your organisation already is on a cloud server, you may want to undertake a cloud-to-cloud migration, which is migrating from one cloud platform to another.
Types of cloud migrations businesses will typically do include migrating to a cloud hosted desktop, a cloud hosted server or a cloud hosted PBX system.
A cloud migration needs a well defined-strategy to be successful and ensure a level of continuity before, during and after for the organisation. It also includes a thorough review of the current infrastructure and decisions on what your organisation needs in a new provider to choose the right one. You can choose to migrate to different types of cloud servers including public, private and hybrid cloud, so research is crucial before you make your choice.
Why is This Important?
Undertaking a cloud migration is often necessary to keep your IT infrastructure up to date in an ever-changing digital world. Moving to the cloud helps organisations drive innovation and leverage modern technology to make business decisions and improve core services.
For businesses who haven’t updated their server provider or technology in some time, it is more often a necessity to migrate to the cloud.
Benefits of Cloud Migrations
As digital technology develops, businesses are open to embracing a cloud migration to reduce costs, accelerate innovation and improve efficiency. Here are the key benefits:
- Scalability: Cloud computing offers on-demand scalability vs traditional infrastructure. You don’t need to continue to invest in expensive hardware to predict future capacity, cloud offers network capacity and storage as and when the organisation needs this. This takes out any additional stress of upgrading capacity should a spike in users, seasonal demands or business growth happen.
- Remote Access: Access hosted desktops, hosted servers, and hosted PBX systems anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. This is ideal when travelling or visiting clients and ensures you always have access to the things you need.
- Cost Efficient: Maintaining and upgrading internal services can often be costly and time-consuming. Cloud providers often have a more cost-efficient model and only pay for what you need.
- Improved Security: Ensuring infrastructure is secure is often a top priority for organisations and most cloud providers offer top security measures. These include data encryption, multifactor authentication, regular security updates and up-to-date compliance with industry regulations.
- Disaster Recovery: Cloud providers often have disaster recovery capabilities, which removes the possibility of any issues with internal hardware or localised data centre failures.
- Automated Back-Up Solutions: Due to high-availability and disaster recovery features, the cloud also provides automated back-up solutions. These solutions will recover lost data quickly and ensure minimal downtime for your business.
- Performance: Cloud providers often have faster response times and need to maintain service-level agreements for availability.
- Faster Time-to-Market: For application development, traditional IT infrastructure can often slow down the deployment. Cloud computing, however, gives clients access to these features instantly through Infrastructure as a service and Platform as a service. Development can be quicker as it removes challenges to deploy, test and scale.
- Sustainability Impact: Cloud computing providers often take into consideration their environmental impact. They reduce environmental impact by having the capability to use more renewable energy sources and optimise cooling systems. Migrating to Cloud can aid Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
Disadvantages of Cloud Migrations
While there are mostly impactful benefits of cloud migration, the process is not without some challenges. These include:
- Potential cyber-security risks: Relying on third-party providers can bring a level of uncertainty about the potential of a cybersecurity attack and data breaches. Not having internal infrastructure means the organisation and the cloud provider have a shared responsibility model. Your organisation is also responsible for taking necessary steps to ensure data is protected.
- Connectivity: For businesses that need 24/7 uptime, you may need to invest in additional services or specific models to ensure this is provided, including hybrid cloud solutions and offline back-ups. Whilst providers have Service Level Agreements, there is always a risk of downtime.
- Potentially high up-front costs: Though Cloud will reduce costs in the long term, the initial migration may be costly. If you have a high number of resources to migrate or applications need to be redesigned to function with the new provider, this can be particularly costly.
- Performance Issues: Though this is not guaranteed, choosing a provider that isn’t localised or suitable for the business may display some connectivity issues. It is important to ensure your provider and solution are right for the business.
- Limited Infrastructure Control: When using a third-party provider, you reduce the control you have over the infrastructure. This is usually an issue if the organisation requires bespoke or strict configurations.
- Migration Complexity: Migrating large volumes of data will be time-consuming, and strict planning needs to be done to avoid data loss and extended downtime.
A lot of the disadvantages of a Cloud migration can be mitigated. A thoroughly planned migration strategy and extensive research into the right solution for your business can help reduce any challenges.
What Are The Cloud Deployment Models?
There are different cloud deployment models to choose from and it’s important to get this right for the needs of your business.
- Public Cloud: A cloud computing environment where all computing resources are owned and managed through a third-party network.
- Private Cloud: This is a Cloud computing environment that is dedicated to one business only and hosted in a data centre or third-party provider. This is more secure for organisations in comparison to a public cloud service.
- Hybrid Cloud: This is a combination of a public and private cloud environment, offering a flexible resource whilst maintaining a higher level of security.
- Multi-Cloud: This method utilises different cloud providers to distribute workloads and avoids a business relying on one single cloud environment.
Choosing which model depends on the reason you’re migrating and what your business will need after the migration, whether this is level of security, overall cost or flexibility.
Cloud Migration Process: How Does It Work?
Asses and Plan
The initial step in starting a migration is assessing the current infrastructure that your business has. This will help outline a migration strategy plan. You will need to assess the migration workload, what your business relies on and their dependencies, costs (including initial migration costs and ongoing costs) and which cloud model you need.
Outlining these will help a more seamless cloud migration.
Choosing A Migration Strategy
After creating a strategy, the next phase is to choose which migration strategy or the 6 ‘Rs’ to choose from. These include:
- Rehosting: Moving applications to the cloud without modification.
- Replatforming: Making minor adjustments to ensure applications perform in the cloud.
- Refactoring: Redesigning applications to ensure features are used in the cloud.
- Repurchasing: Replacing existing software with cloud-based software.
- Retiring: Removing existing outdated applications.
- Retaining: Keeping some applications on site (not moving to the cloud) for compliance or operational reasons.
Choosing which one is right for your business should take into consideration the assessment and plan created in step 1. Factoring in cost, business alignment and technical requirements.
Prepare The Cloud Environment
Once you have decided on your provider and migration strategy, the next phase is to prepare the cloud environment to deploy these methods. You should begin the setup for configuring cloud resources, implementing security measures and establishing connectivity. Cloud providers often have migration setup and support to assist you with this.
Migrate Data and Applications
Now it is time to migrate your data and applications. There are different ways that this can be done and you can reach out to your Cloud provider for assistance and advice on which one to deploy.
You can move all your applications at once. This is the fastest way to migrate to the Cloud, however also the most risky as if anything goes wrong the downtime can impact the business.
There is also a phased migration, where different applications are moved over at different times. It will start with the low-impact business applications and move onto the critical ones towards the end.
The last one is to parallel your infrastructure until the migration is complete. Then, it will be gradually switched over after testing is complete on the Cloud server. It is important to remember that testing is required at all stages to ensure applications are running as they should for your organisation.
Cloud Services With SES Computers
Here at SES Computers, we offer specialist cloud services that will help your business stay ahead. Whether you are looking for cloud hosted desktops, cloud hosted servers, cloud hosted PBX or you want to backup data in a cloud, our experienced team is here to help.
With overall low costs, security and reliability guaranteed, we can help you migrate your existing infrastructure to the cloud.
For more information, fill out our contact form or call us on 01305 238999.